S terry, P eter

Abstract

The works of Peter Sterry (1613–72) vividly evoke the intellectual world of a Cromwellian chaplain during the Puritan triumph and after. His letters, treatises, poems, and sermons reveal the altered sensibilities, imagination, and language of post‐Interregnum nonconformism. They re‐evaluate Puritan failure and, through a detailed account of nonconformist life, establish a transformed ideology of community. Sterry's corpus as a whole reflects on a variety of religious and artistic themes – eschatology, ‘Christ as mother’, the ars moriendi , Aristotelian tragedy, and Druid communities; it engages with authors as diverse as Ovid, Marsilio Ficino, Jakob Boehme, and John Donne; and it experiments with a range of styles and genres – poems, meditations, letters, catechisms, sermons, devotions, allegory, and writings for children. Sterry's prose has been compared to John Milton's in its grandeur, and to John Bunyan's and George Fox's in its intensity. His works can also be more obviously compared to those of other Interregnum writers such as John Owen, Thomas Goodwin, William Erbery, William Sedgwick, and Morgan Llwyd. Sterry has not, however, attracted as much scholarly interest as he deserves: a biography by Vivian de Sola Pinto (1968), an edited volume (Matar & Croft 1981), and a series of articles by Nabil Matar (1982–94) constitute the main body of scholarly work on him.